head to head · open source
crawlee vs anakin
crawlee has 26,335 GitHub stars, 1,746 forks, 135 open issues and last shipped yesterday. anakin has 3,880 stars, 164 forks, 82 open issues and last shipped 3 months ago. crawlee leads on adoption by 579% (26,335 vs 3,880 stars). crawlee is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0; anakin is written in Go under AGPL-3.0. crawlee has attracted 7% as many forks as stars, anakin 4%. crawlee was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (playwright, scraper), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| crawlee | anakin | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 3.9K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-08-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.7K | ⑂ 164 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick crawlee if
- You weight community size — 26K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick anakin if
- You want the anakin feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and anakin fits your workflow better
About crawlee
A web scraping and browser automation library Crawlee covers your crawling and scraping end to end and helps you build reliable scrapers. Fast. Your crawlers will appear human like and fly under the radar of modern bot protections even with the default configuration. Crawlee gives you the tools to crawl the web for links, scrape data, and store it to disk or cloud while staying configurable to suit your project's needs. Crawlee is available as the crawlee NPM package. 👉 View full documentation, guides and examples on the Crawlee project website 👈 Do you prefer 🐍 Python instead of JavaScript? 👉 Checkout…
read the full crawlee overview →
About anakin
AnakinScraper OSS The open source web scraping API for AI. Turn any website into LLM ready markdown or structured data. Self host with a single command. No cloud dependencies. Powers RAG pipelines, AI agents, and data extraction at scale. Why AnakinScraper? Features Handler chain with fallback — HTTP fetch → anti detect browser → external API. Each handler tries in order; if one fails, the next picks up automatically. Most pages resolve on the free local HTTP handler — paid APIs are only called for the 5% that actually need them. Docs → Custom API handlers — plug in any third party scraping service as a chain…
read the full anakin overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is crawlee or anakin more popular?
crawlee has 26,335 GitHub stars and anakin has 3,880. crawlee has the larger community by that measure.
Are crawlee and anakin free?
Both are open source. crawlee is licensed under Apache-2.0 and anakin under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between crawlee and anakin?
crawlee is written in TypeScript and anakin in Go. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, crawlee or anakin?
Choose crawlee if you want the larger community (26,335 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose anakin if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.